We minimise and avoid costs whenever possible. Yet we engage in costly behaviour when the goal is worthwhile. Research in the last decade has uncovered how our decisions are not only driven by reward goals, but also by effort costs. In this talk, I will present previous work on effort-based decision making and the involvement of fronto-striatal network when subjects anticipate, learn, and choose to overcome effort challenges. I will discuss how effort-based decision making is a viable framework to assess individual differences in motivation to overcome challenges. Furthermore, I will show how tradeoffs between reward and pain costs are influenced by recent experiences.

About the Speaker:

Irma Kurniawan completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London, UK under the supervision of Prof. Nick Chater and Prof. Ray Dolan. She then went on to do a post-doctoral research at Brain and Spine Institute in Paris at the Motivation, Brain and Behaviour Lab with Dr. Mathias Pessiglione. She joined the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in 2013, under the supervision of Prof. Michael Chee to study the effects of sleep on decision-making and memory. She has dedicated most of her work on investigating the neural mechanisms for effort-based decision-making. Her main interests lie in the involvement of frontal-subcortical brain network in motivated cognition.